I. Field
The present disclosure relates generally to communication, and more specifically to techniques for scheduling users in a wireless communication system.
II. Background
Wireless communication systems are widely deployed to provide various communication services such as voice, video, packet data, messaging, broadcast, etc. These systems may be multiple-access systems capable of supporting multiple users by sharing the available system resources. Examples of such multiple-access systems include Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) systems, Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) systems, Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA) systems, Orthogonal FDMA (OFDMA) systems, and Single-Carrier FDMA (SC-FDMA) systems.
In a CDMA communication system, multiple user equipments (UEs) may currently transmit on the uplink to a Node B. The transmission from each UE acts as interference to the transmissions from other UEs at the Node B. The received signal quality of a given UE may be dependent on various factors such as the amount of transmit power used by the UE, the path loss from the UE to the Node B, the amount of interference observed by the UE at the Node B, etc. The received signal quality of the UE may be improved by increasing the transmit power of the UE. However, the higher transmit power of the UE would increase the amount of interference to other UEs, each of which may need to increase its transmit power in order to maintain the desired received signal quality for that UE.
The UEs may be intermittently active on the uplink and may transmit sporadically whenever there is data to send. The UEs may be scheduled for transmission on the uplink whenever they have data to send. The scheduling may be challenging due to the interference between the uplink transmissions from different UEs.